Standard go error handling maximises for locality. You don't see many "long range" effects where you have to go and read the rest of the code to understand what's going to happen. Ideally everything you need is in the diff in front of you.

Stuff like defer() schedules de-alloc "near" to where things get allocated, you don't have to think about conditionals. If an MR touches only part of a large function you don't have to read the whole thing and understand the control flow.

The relative lack of abstraction limits the "infrastructure" / DSLs that ICs can create which renders code impenetrable to an outside reader. In a lot of C++ codebases you basically can't read an MR without digging into half the program because what looks like a for loop is calling down into a custom iterator, or someone has created a custom allocator or _something_ that means code which looks simple has surprising behaviour.

A partial solution for that problem is to have a LOT of tests, but it manifests in other ways, e.g. figuring out the runtime complexity of a random snippet of C++ can be surprisingly hard without reading a lot of the program.

I personally find these things make go MRs somewhat easier to review than in other languages. IMHO people complaining "it's more annoying to write" (lacking stronger abstractions available in many other languages) are correct but that's not the whole story.

P.S: For Close(), you're right that most examples skip checking the error and maybe it would be better if they didn't. It only costs a few lines to have a function that takes anything Closable and logs an error (usually not much else you can do) but people like to skip that in examples.

  type Closable interface {
    Close() error
  }

  func checkedClose(c Closable, resourceName string) {
    if err := c.Close(); err != nil {
      log.Printf("failed to close %s: %v", resourceName, err)
    }
  }

Sounds like the problem you have with the error checking relates more to development practice of colleagues than the language.

We used defer frequently. Never considered it ugly.

'goto' (hypothesising here as not used it) and use of exception handling that is expected to be handled at edge of boundary points in codebase can be elegant but does need careful thought and design is my experience. Can hide all sorts of issues, lead to a lot of spurious error handling for those that don't understand the intent. That's the biggest issue I have with implicit (magical) error handling - too many people do it poorly.